September 28, 2010

But there are some students who are asking teachers to cancel class so they can attend. Imagine that! A teacher canceling class for a political rally.

I think Nietzsche is a little more important — important enough to correct the spelling of his name in the quote before putting it in the blog post heading. Madison.com spelled it "Nietschze." How do you misspell Nietzsche in a news story? Isn't it obvious you need to check?

Unless things have changed since I was student there, they don't take attendance. Skip class, get the notes from a friend, and go to the rally. Why make everyone else who doesn't want to go miss class?

“When I told Boesche that just a couple of years later, Obama had devoured the writings of Nietzsche and other political thinkers during his solitary spell in New York City, Boesche said that Obama certainly must have gone through a philosophical growth experience. “Nietzsche calls everything into question. You have to call everything into question. He says God is dead,” Boesche said. “So if he kept reading Nietzsche, he went through a whole reasoning process in which he reevaluated all the core beliefs that he had—and then came out on the other side.

French is the most natural langauge, according to a Frenchman, because the words occur in the same order as the thoughts.

Except that it is rarely pronounced the way it reads.

I would guess that the word order is not all that different from the other Romance languages, which do pronounce more they way that they are spelled.

Of course, American English is probably even harder than French in this way. It is just that we all know how to pronounce all those weird words, and so don't think that it is that hard - and one reason that English is so full of these weird words is that it lends itself to picking up words from all over the place, including, of course, French.

My first thought was that if I was a UW professor I'd schedule an hourly exam for the afternoon of the President's rally. But then I had a better idea; I'd cancel class and encourage them to go and listen to the petulant excuse for a politician.

From Wikipedia: "Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people." and that Exceptional people "should follow their own 'inner law.'"

That pretty much states the politician's credo.

(And count me among those who think Nietzche was a loon who occasionally said insightful things.)

Nietzche was just another power drunk madman. True power does not come from killing off others until only you are left. But it will be tried again and again... and that's why we will always need a military force to fight the power drunk madmen.

Julie...I would not joke about a seductive madman like Nietzsche. His instincts to power over others is a normal human desire that he made mainstream and acceptable to scholars, instead of culturally restrained as it needs to be, like a pit bull that otherwise kills strangers instinctively, and then kills its owner too. He was the Charles Manson of his day spewing poison. Did you ever consider that maybe you enjoy his poison too much?

traditionalguy - Nietzsche opened many philosophical doors. You can't blame him for whether people decided to walk through a few of the worse ones. What I like about Nietzsche is that he distilled the human essence to that of Will. If you understand that, you can understand all human behaviour, both for good and for evil.